


Keep going

by kaige68



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: 1_million_words, Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-11 06:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10457514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaige68/pseuds/kaige68
Summary: Faraday felt the heat and the wind as a body hit him.  A deafening roar as he felt his body lift and tumble.  The smell of gunpowder, of sweat and horse.  He could taste dirt and then everything went dark.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Agdhani's Madlibs Weekend Challenge at 1MW *mumblemumble* weeks ago. I am nothing if not timely.
> 
> Prompts were: Person: Parent, Place: Airport, Thing: Computer, Adjective: Bright, Verb: massage, Color: Royal Blue
> 
> Not the easiest prompts to fit into a Western. And oddly Airport and computer came right to me. Anyway...
> 
> Super speedy read throughs done by Asphaltcowgrrl and Haldoor (because I am needy and need that much affirmation). Thank you ladies, without you I would not be half as sane. 
> 
> All remaining errors are to be blamed on me.
> 
> This is finished, all chapters will be posted ASAP.

_“You always have to have that last say, Joshua.”_ He remembered his mama telling him. He remembered her saying those words while she was threatening to take a switch to his back side. He recalled that was what she generally saying whenever he was getting the switch. And as he recalled young Joshua Faraday typically got the switch longer and harder as he typically had some response while he was getting his punishment.

That was the thing, he supposed. What kept him going beyond all the holes in him. Past falling off the damn horse. Faraday needed to get that last jackass word in. He needed to stop the Gatling gun. He needed to make sure it didn’t mow down… But he needed to get in that last word.

His mama still wouldn’t be proud of him, but he’d done good. 

Faraday felt the heat and the wind as a body hit him. A deafening roar as he felt his body lift and tumble. The smell of gunpowder, of sweat and horse. He could taste dirt and then everything went dark.


	2. Chapter 2

It was a confusing mix of things. The room was enormous and entirely white with short lines of people waiting for someone at different white counters. But when Joshua looked closer it was a meadow that stretched on in every direction with those same people waiting at the back of wagons, wooden arches or some piece of furniture. 

The white was disconcerting, nerve-wracking, and when he thought about it how it was strange, then it would be meadow and comforting. There was also a sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It was music, maybe. A song, but nobody was singing. It didn’t sound like any song he’d ever heard, and it made him think of dark haired women that were tall and tan and young and lovely… It was soothing too, making him forget the white market sort of place.

The sun was bright. Joshua looked down at his feet to try and get his bearings - what was north, what time of day it might be - the white squares he was standing on shocked him. He stepped back quickly as if to get off the shiny square and the ground under him was green grass with the odd wild flower again. But there was no shadow. He turned slowly, no shadow anywhere. Even the people standing and waiting (some of them in very bizarre clothes) didn’t cast shadows. That was jarring too. He closed his eyes, his mind seemed to focus on the music again. When he opened his eyes again, he couldn’t remember why he’d needed to close them. 

He turned a bit to his left. Looking over the people. Then to his right. He decided to start walking, see what sights he could take in. After a minute or so, or maybe an hour, he found a line of 4 people that felt right to him. He moved to stand behind a woman who looked like she was in her scant underthings, but Faraday just nodded at her when she turned to look at him, she smiled pleasantly in return. 

Humming along with the song that was still in the air, Joshua waited his turn.


	3. Chapter 3

Joshua felt himself swaying slightly with the music. He noticed that the woman in front of him was moving and humming as well. She moved a step forward, and he looked up noticing the man at the very front of the line had gone. Faraday hadn’t seen the man walk away, but he was nowhere to be seen. The space turned white again, and then back to the meadow. The man in front of the woman in front of Faraday was talking pleasantly to the woman standing behind an expensive looking writing desk. The sort of thing Joshua had never seen sitting in a field before. 

Eventually, another man came to stand behind Joshua. Like the woman in front of Faraday, the man behind him was in strange clothing, but his was tight and shiny, not like something that was shot through with silver or gold threads, but purple shiny. Nearly so shiny that Joshua wouldn’t have been surprised if he could catch a reflection of himself. And the man’s shirt was white and shiny, but showed off an excessive amount of chest hair. The man’s eye glasses were all blacked out. It struck Faraday as strange and then it felt normal again, like the woman had if he thought about it, and then it didn’t matter if he thought about it. 

The woman stepped forward again, and again, he hadn’t noticed the person at the front of the line leaving. He also couldn’t recall what he’d been thinking of while he waited, what he’d been looking at. Clean white again and then back to meadow. Another man stepped up behind Mister Shiny. Joshua hummed, swayed, _tall and tan and young and lovely_... and then he was stepping forward with nobody standing between him and woman at the desk who smiled warmly at him.

“Good morning Mister?” 

“Faraday. Joshua Faraday.” He watched with confusion as she poked her finger onto a piece of glass. The world went white again. He watched writing appear on the glass. Neat writing like a newspaper, not someone’s scrawl. The woman smiled at what she was reading. Faraday felt his world tilt again. Everything was white. White floor as far as he could see, white ceiling, no walls, white desks at the head of every line and every attendant had little shiny pieces of glass they were pushing their fingers at. He reached for the counter and watched his hand come in contact with the wooden writing desk. When he looked up at the woman in the field she was holding a ledger and writing in it with a fluffy feathered quill pen.

“I’m sorry about that, Mister Faraday. We’re hitting some glitches today. Please just close your eyes and listen to the music if things feel off at all. Alright?” Once he nodded at her she flipped through some of the pages in her book. And then smiled at him again. “Your reservation is for boarding on number twenty-eight, and I do have your ticket here for you, but it also says that you aren’t actually scheduled to board yet. You are welcome to check in and board now, or you can go back. It is entirely up to you.” She paused and seemed to be waiting for him to answer.

“So,” he stalled waiting for some part of his memory to come to him. “I can board number twenty-eight now or I can go back?”

“Yes, Mister Faraday. It is your choice.” She waited for him, seemingly unsure of what to do with him. “It is very rare that guests get a choice. Once you’re scheduled to board, it’s usually …”

“Time to board?” Joshua prompted.

“Exactly.” She seemed relieved that he was getting what she was vaguely saying.

Only he wasn’t. “Because once a person is scheduled to board you’ve got to board, but a reservation means you can wait a bit?”

“Exactly!” She beamed.

“So, I get to choose?”

“You do!” She was extremely excited.

“Between boarding number twenty-eight or going back.” Joshua tried to hedge again.

She just about glowed with joy.

He was just going to have to admit that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Going back where?”

“Oh! I’m sorry.” She poked the glass with her finger “It must have crashed more of the programing than we thought. We had an influx that was larger than we were expecting. The whole system went down for a moment and they are just working out a few bugs that still need to be tweaked.” She poked the glass some more. “You would think we would know better. The Warning Department sent the signals, and a prophet, and there were even sirens, but you know,” She smiled and shrugged. “Humanity just doesn’t like to listen. We know this, but we still only expect a smattering of folks to show and not the crowds we get.”

The glare of the white bothered him. That none of the words the woman was saying made a lick of sense bothered him. That she took it all so indifferently bothered him. Joshua closed his eyes, he listened to the music, and tried to think of where he might want to get back to. A moment later he opened his eyes again, to the nice woman at a desk in the meadow. Her smile had dimmed, she looked apologetic. “Go back where?” He asked again.

“Back to Rose Creek.” She flipped a few pages in her book. “Back to Mister Vasquez. You did make quite the impression on him, as I see he made on you too. His reservation is earlier than yours… Oh, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. But you would have quite a bit of time together.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “You’re my first passenger that has had the option of going back. I don’t want to sway your decision but…” She leaned closer and whispered. “Mister Vasquez isn’t scheduled to board number twenty-eight when he does board. That could change, but… right now…”

Everything around Joshua seemed to solidify suddenly. The meadow had birds and a breeze whistling through the wildflowers. The sound did make him think of happy young women, almost song like. The sun beat down on him, warming him, leaving a shadow to his left.

But it felt more wrong than whatever it was he couldn’t remember that had just felt wrong a moment before. It was like an ugly building he had once seen where the front was made from brick but the other three sides that you might not see from the street were all wood. As though it was trying to look better without being as sturdy as it seemed.

“Rose Creek,” He felt desperate. “I wanna go back to Rose Creek.”


	4. Chapter 4

Bright hurt like hell, or maybe even more. It felt like the sun was shining through his eyelids. Burning into his head, like… well, he wasn’t sure quite what it might be like.

Joshua thought on the brightness some more, which felt brighter and hurt more than before he thought about it. His whole body hurt, and it might be that the bright was trying to come out of him. Out through what might be a hole in his side, and another in his shoulder. Another hole and another hole and… the pain and bright seemed to have a lot of places to be coming out of him.

He couldn’t open his eyes. But if the bright hurt that much with his eyes closed he didn’t think he’d want to open them. His breathing felt little. He couldn’t fill his chest with air, so the breaths felt small and short. It felt like a horse was sitting on his chest and he couldn’t take in all the air he wanted.

It occurred to him that a horse on his chest should at least keep part of him in shadow, but that clearly wasn’t the case. Damn bright horse.

There was a wet feeling too. Some places felt warm and wet, some had a cold wet feeling. There was a place or two that had a sticky itchy uncomfortable on top of the wet and bright and pain. Maybe the horse was leaking. 

_Goddammit, if Jack is leaking on me…_ Faraday tried to move an arm to swat at his damn horse, but his arm didn’t move so well and everything got brighter and more painful with the attempted movement. The horse felt heavier.

Someone took hold of his hand. There was a voice hushing him, shushing him, leaving him the impression that he should keep still. The touch on his hand was light, and then he recognized a word that the shusher was saying. Well, he recognized that is was a word he’d been called before, not that he recognized what the word meant. 

Vasquez was there. Trying to keep him still, to ease the horse off his chest, to dim the bright, to dry the wet. Faraday was glad he had rethought his opinion of Mexican cowboys. His mama might be proud of him for that. Vasquez’s mama should be proud of him too. Faraday would tell him so but the bright and the horse and the wet were working against him. 

“Shhhh. I know.” Vasquez’s voice cut through some of the fog in Faraday’s head (which was odd as Faraday hadn’t expected that there’d be fog with all the bright going on). “I know. Quiet now. I’m here. Shhhh.”

So Faraday tried to hush. To keep still. To let the bright and pain fade, to let the weight lift some with Vasquez’s presence. He felt himself drifting, sort of floating in the bright, and then he felt Vasquez try to let go of his hand. Faraday’s whole body jerked trying to hang on to Vasquez. The leaking bright heavy horse went back to sitting on his chest, but he couldn’t let Vasquez go. He couldn’t.

“Shhhh.” Came back to his ears again. And then the strange endearment. “I won’t go. Just be still. I won’t go.”

Faraday let himself drift with that promise.


	5. Chapter 5

Someone had come in to visit Faraday carrying most of a spindle from a chair. Just something they had carried with them. Something to hold in their hand while they said the nice polite things to him in his sick bed. Something to keep them busy so they didn’t say out loud that they thought he might be the Devil’s own spawn for managing to live through that explosion.

People smiled at Vasquez when they saw him (or at least from what Faraday could see from his bed), tipped their hats, spoke respectfully. They liked Vasquez, and were grateful for all that he’d done to save their little town.

They avoided Faraday as much as possible. The man who stopped that damn machine gun. The man who went on a suicide mission but didn’t die. Maybe if he had died he’d have a nice plot between Horne and Billy where the townsfolk would come and pay their respects to him.

But those that did venture in to see him (‘cause he had saved their damn town too), seemed to need an excuse, a distraction, and then a reason to leave quickly. Joshua supposed he should be grateful that they did come to visit. But then he supposed he should be dead, and with the amount of pain he was in just moving around his room he sometimes wished he was, so the gratitude for the visits wasn’t as pressing as it probably ought to be.

Faraday moved the chair spindle back and forth in his palms, making his arms move, sometimes slower and more painfully than others. It was just a piece of scrap that someone had been holding when they came to visit. Junk like it tended to be left in his room with their discomfort. Vasquez, when he left after his last visit of the night, usually took the debris from the room, but he’d left the spindle.

Someone had taken the time to turn the thing, someone had made the effort to care for it when it was whole. There were ridges and grooves, nicely rounded, polished and waxed. The turned wood was once part of something pretty. Once. Whoever had carried it up had either seen the piece as part of their life that they had lost, or as the rubble from the fight for Rose Creek.

Joshua saw it a bit differently.

Vasquez came to visit him every morning and every night. He’d bring in breakfast, and then dinner. Faraday had picked up from the others that Vasquez was helping get the town as back to rights as they could manage between the meals he carried in. Sam and Red had moved on. Horne, Goodnight and Billy were planted in a field. Faraday had no choice but to stay until he could move. Vasquez chose to be there. 

At dinner one night, with Faraday barely able to feed himself, after Vasquez had been staring at the chair piece for days, he picked up the wooden dowel and sat down on the edge of Joshua’s bed. 

“Move this.” He said, and without waiting for Faraday to do it or not, Vasquez picked up the plate and set it aside. He picked up the wooden piece, and holding it at both ends set it crosswise on the blanket covering Faraday’s thigh. Right on the spot where a chunk of flesh had gone missing. Right on the spot where Faraday tended to rub at the pain without realizing it. Keeping his palms on the wood, Vasquez rolled the wood up and down Faraday’s leg.

It took a minute, but then it felt like heaven. Easing the day and the hopelessness out of the knot that his leg had become. 

That became what they did. 

Most of Faraday’s skin was knit back together. He was getting up out of bed himself. He’d progressed from gimping around his room, to gimping around the second floor of the Imperial. He was heading for the stairs next. But every night, after dinner and a discussion about what Vasquez had fixed and what was left to be done around the town, Vasquez would pick up the spindle and roll it over some part of Faraday’s aching body. His leg, his arm, his back. And then he’d hand Faraday a deck of cards and let the gambler play, or show off, or cheat.

Those were the moments when Faraday could be grateful that he’d lived. He twirled the piece of wood back and forth across his palms waiting for dinner.


	6. Chapter 6

There was a strange dark lump on the horizon as they rode southwest. Vasquez and Faraday. Not heading anywhere in particular, just away from Rose Creek. Together. Toward the dark lump together..

Faraday had announced to Emma Cullen that as soon as he could manage to sit on a horse he’d be on his way and stop imposing on the kindness of her and her neighbors. She’d politely insisted that he wasn’t a bother. They both knew better, but he wasn’t about to call her bluff. 

“You’re leaving?” Vasquez had come busting into his room at dinner time. 

“When I can.” Faraday sat on the edge of his bed, shuffling the cards in his hands, not meeting Vasquez’ gaze. He’d been getting dressed every day for a week now. Moving up and down the stairs. Spending the days in the sunlight, while he rested from the task of moving around. “Were you thinking on settling here? I’m sure they wouldn’t turn you in. And some of the new widows might take a fancy to you once they stop mourning.”

“But not you?” The question was humorous but hesitant. Hesitant was an odd thing coming from Vasquez.

“These folks don’t see me the same way they see you.”

“You’re a hero to them, Guero.”

“I’m Satan’s own, and you know it. I shouldn’ta lived-” Faraday made a shushing noise when Vasquez tried to interrupt. “I’m glad I made it. And while I’m sure some of them see me as part hero, most of them will be glad to see me leave.”

“You think they’re happy to have a Mexican? You think they’d let one of their own _take a fancy_ to me, widow or no?” He sounded derisive, but not angry.

“So you’ll leave too?”

Vasquez just nodded as he set down their dinner on the small table in Joshua’s room.

“With me?”

“Si.”

Faraday stood and moved to the table, pulled out the newly built chair. “You stayed for me?”

Their eyes met across the food. Vasquez smiled. “Si.”

Faraday had assumed that as soon as he could pull himself up onto Jack, they’d be gone. Vasquez had told him they weren’t leaving until he could sit a horse for two full days in a row.

They’d compromised. Over a week after they decided to leave together, they spent the better part of the morning walking around the town. Vasquez proudly showing off the work he’d done and introducing Faraday to some folks he hadn’t met before. They mounted their horses and crossed the fields to where the townsfolk had buried their three friends. Joshua cried. He saw tears in Vasquez’s eyes. And then Vasquez kissed him.

They packed up and headed out the next morning.

It had been rough going for Faraday. Vasquez hadn’t let him ride more than half a day. What would normally be a two day ride was taking them the better part of a week. They started late every day, took long breaks for lunch, and stopped earlier than Faraday would have suggested even if he was willing to admit to the pain and exhaustion.

But it was… nice. They got along. And somehow Faraday had a new appreciation for the look of a wild meadow. They ate companionably, they joked frequently, and they did silent without that awkwardness that usually invaded Faraday’s brain when nobody was talking. Then too, they kissed pretty well in those silences. Not much more, but there was a promise to Vasquez’s touches that said when Faraday was in better health there would be a hell of a lot more.

“Storm.” 

Vasquez’s word tore Faraday from his fanciful thoughts and had him look west. The wind had picked up without him noticing and there looked to be a hell of a thunderstorm headed their way. He nudged Jack into moving a bit faster.

Vasquez reached for his reins as if he knew what the speed would do to jostle Faraday’s sore body. 

“Just to that thing.” Faraday pointed to the dark blob on the horizon. There was a thick tree next to it, and the whatever it was now looked blue and large enough to shelter both men while the horses were under the tree. “Not far.” Joshua could make the distance without being useless once the storm passed. 

Vasquez let them speed up a bit more.

The strange dark lump turned out to be an abandoned stage coach. Two missing wheels and one broken, leaving he coach at an odd angle inside. The window shades were in rough shape, but they’d keep out most of the rain. 

Vasquez secured the horses under the densest part of the tree, while Faraday climbed into the coach and tied the windows closed. The sky opened up and Vasquez dashed inside. 

The coach wasn’t large enough to make the seats or the floor into a large enough bed for either of them. Josh placed himself into the corner that was lowest, petting at the spot next to him. They let gravity settle Vazquez next to him. Head on Faraday’s chest, Faraday’s arm around his shoulders. 

Vasquez turned his head, placed his ear against Faraday’s heart. Listened to the thump-thump for a few minutes. “I am glad you came back to us, Guero.” 

Faraday squeezed the man in his arms and smiled into the lightning-lit blue coach.

“I am glad you came back to me.”

“For as long as they’ll let me stay.” Faraday whispered against the lips that waited for him.


End file.
